Reducing Customer Complaints in B2B Customer Service
In a perfect world, everything would work as intended and all our customers would be happy. However, things do go wrong and as a business it’s important to plan for when issues pop up. That’s why we all have customer service professionals on our team that work with our customers to ensure they are satisfied with our business relationship. But, in a world that’s always striving to be more efficient, how can you reduce issues to save money and make customers even happier? Here are 4 tips to reduce customer service complaints…
1) Offer multiple ways for customers to reach you – One of the keys for minimizing complaints is to make customers happy at the start of the customer service process. This can be accomplished by offering support across multiple channels including phone, email, and live chat. Through these methods, the conversation starts off on a positive foot as it enables your customers to choose their preferred way to speak with you. If you force them to use a single channel, whatever that channel may be, you’re going to have a percentage of your customers that are already unhappy because they are being forced into something that they don’t want to do. Even if it’s just two or three channels, the impact of choice is very powerful with customers.
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2) Match the right agents to customers – This is an important tip more companies need to consider. Relationships matter in the business-to-business (B2B) world and your customers value agents who understand their business. For example, assigning a more technical agent to work with an IT company on their email tickets may reduce customer complaints because they know the agent is qualified to answer their questions. This can build a level of trust that may earn your company more forgiveness should a larger issue occur and can also improve agent efficiency as they become familiar with a customer.
3) Utilize the benefits of customer service technology – If you’re a smaller or mid-sized business, maybe keeping track of issues over email or in a spreadsheet worked in the past. Now, thanks to cloud-based customer service technology, it’s easier than ever to reduce complaints by deploying customer service software. Not only can you use the software to resolve tickets faster (which can reduce negative feedback) but you can also use sophisticated technology such as ticket automation to make sure certain tickets go to certain agents. Instead of having to manually route tickets from IT companies, this can all be done automatically with the right help desk ticketing software.
4) Make the most of your self-service portal – Letting customers answer their own questions on their own time may be the best way to reduce customer complaints. This is where self-service, or creating an online documentation portal, is highly valuable to businesses. If it contains valuable and relevant content, you’ll see an almost immediate drop in customer service complaints after deploying and advertising a self-service portal. Managing a portal is also easier than ever before with many customer service software solutions now including B2B Portal Software.
In short, there are several different methods a company can use to reduce customer service complaints. From being more accessible to matching the right agents to customers, the human element of communication and knowledge is still important. With this said, a larger push has been made in the customer service industry to aid agents with the right technology to not only assist customers more efficiently but also empower them to find their own answers via customer self-service. Customer service teams should always be looking to reduce complaints, and fortunately in this era of technology there are several ways to go about increasing customer satisfaction both now and in the future.
